Watersprings eBook

“Well,” said Howard, smiling, “I
have no theory on the subject. I never regarded
marriage as either impossible or possible. It
seemed to me that one was either caught away in a
fiery chariot, or else was left under one’s
juniper tree; and I have been very comfortable there.
I thought I had all I wanted; and I feel a little dizzy
now at the way in which my cup of life has suddenly
been seized and filled with wine to the brim.
One doesn’t find a home and a mother and a wife
in a fortnight!”

“I don’t know!” said Mrs. Graves,
smiling at him. “Some of the best marriages
I know have been made in haste. I remember talking
to a girl the other day who was engaged to a man within
ten days of the time they had met. I said, ‘Well,
you have not wasted time.’ ‘Oh,’
she said, apparently rather hurt, ’I kept Henry
waiting a long time. I had to think it all over.
I wasn’t by any means sure I wanted to marry
him.’ I quoted a saying of an old friend
of mine who when he was asked why he had proposed
to a girl he had only known three days, said, ’I
don’t know! I liked her, and thought I
should like to see more of her!’”

“I think I must make out a list of possible
candidates,” said Howard, smiling. “I
dare say your Jane would help me. I could mark
them for various qualities; we believe in marks at
Cambridge. But I must have time to get used to
all my new gifts.”

“Oh, one doesn’t take long to get used
to happiness,” said Mrs. Graves. “It
always seems the most natural thing in the world.
Tennyson was all wrong about sorrow. Sorrow is
always the casual mistress, and not the wife.
One recovers from everything but happiness; that is
one’s native air.”

IX

THE VICAR

The Vicarage was a pleasant house, with an air of
comfort and moderate wealth about it. It was
part of Frank Sandys’ sense, thought Howard,
that he was content to live so simple and retired a
life. He did not often absent himself, even for
a holiday. Howard was shown into the study which
Mr. Sandys had improved and enlarged. It was
a big room, with an immense, perfectly plain deal
table in the middle, stained a dark brown; and the
Vicar showed Howard with high glee how each of the
four sides of the table was consecrated to a different
avocation. “My accounts end!” he said,
“my sermon side! my correspondence end! my genealogical
side!” There were a number of small dodges,
desks for holding books, flaps which could be let
up and down, slits in the table through which papers
could be dropped into drawers, a cord by which the
bell could be rung without rising from his place,
a cord by which the door could be bolted. “Not
very satisfactory, that last,” said the Vicar,
“but I am on the track of an improvement.
The worst of it is,” said the good man, “that
I have so little time. I make extracts from the
books I read for my sermons, I cut out telling anecdotes
from the papers. I like to raise questions every